Welcome all, to another week of Kemono no Souja Erin. This is a bit of a down week for the show, without much going for it. There are bits and pieces of good things of course, but overall I was a bit disappointed in this week. Why is that? Well let’s dive in and find out.
Getting right to it, first up is episode 25, “The Two Go Out Shopping”. This is… To be brutally honest this is a filler episode. Almost nothing of consequence happens, nothing is progressed, it’s just the Egg Thieves showing us how they have grown and changed since we first met them. Don’t get me wrong, that’s nice and I’m glad to see them get some development. I just can’t say it was particularly interesting, or welcome. Maybe were they anything more then gag characters it would mean something. They simply aren’t very important, nor engaging, for me. They could disappear at any point in the series and I honestly don’t think I would notice or care. Maybe that’s a bit harsh, it’s not like they are actively bringing down the series or anything. They just happen to be the least interesting part of Erin in every way.
To try and be positive about them for a moment though, the bit of their history we did get wasn’t bad. Them running away from mandatory service, from labor, from law. Constantly running away from things and never truly standing up for themselves or committing to anything. Then finding Erin, a small child who saved them not once but twice, who took them in and gave them work/purpose, and using that as inspiration to turn their lives around. That was nice. I just wish it wasn’t wrapped around them completely failing a shopping trip, losing their shopping money, working a job they didn’t understand the payment for, then revealing that they hadn’t actually lost anything at all and it was all meaningless. It just wasn’t very satisfying for me, even with the good emotional beats the episode had.
Moving on we come to episode 26, “Lilan’s Heart”. This one sees us return to Lilan and Erin, and is all around a really nice continuation of their story. We get to see Erin more of Erin’s hopes and dreams for Lilan, her desire for her to live free and fly amongst other Beast-Lords. Her refusal to allow Lilan to be kept in captivity for her entire life. We’ve seen all of this before, none of it is new. But this time Erin is framing it less as her desire as a Beastinarian and more as Lilan’s mother. While not a significant shift in perspective, it’s one I quite like and I think makes later episodes from this week hit a bit harder. It’s Erin setting up the ground work for things to come. And it works well!
It comes across in all of the small moments throughout the episode. Stuff like Erin playing fetch with Lilan with a hat, or communicating without a harp. Erin is showing us, rather then simply telling us, how their relationship is growing. How Erin is becoming like Lilan’s mother. There’s even a moment in the episode where Lilan sneaks up on Erin, reminiscent of the story we heard earlier about a Beast-Lord eating a student, and we are led to believe much the same is about to happen to Erin. Even she’s afraid! Yet instead Lilan licks her face, an intimate moment that no other human has probably ever experienced with a Beast-Lord. It was a nice little bait and switch, showing us just how different their relationship is compared to normal caretakers.
Of course none of this comes without a cost. Erin has spent so much time with Lilan that she’s actually fallen behind on her studies and, if she fails her end-of-year exam, might be expelled. I really like this! I like that Erin kept track of Erin’s time, gave her consequences/showed how hard it is to effectively be a single mother. And Erin built on it really well, bringing the entire school together to help Erin study. From Urari providing notes to Tomura having a little study date, everyone worked together to pass. There was no competition, no “I’ll let you fail so I can be the best”. Just comradery and unity. Sure, it was a bit rushed in the second half of the episode, but I still found it rather nice.
Speaking of study date, this episode also continues the growing trend of romance in Erin. Not just from Tomura, though I think Erin did that to continue slow-rolling the relationship in our mind, but from Yuuyan as well. Hers was much smaller, more of a gag in the episode than anything else. She worried over another student, Kashugan, buying a nice piece of jewelry and assumed it was for a girl. While a bit silly, I do get it. She’s young, she’s going to assume the worst, though you would hope someone smart enough to be in this school would consider him possibly having a sister. Overall it was a weak, if amusing, plot point that seemed more geared to setting up Erin and Tomura rather then Yuuyan and… anyone else.
This brings us to episode 27, “Fallen to Hikara”. This was… This was a really odd episode. I’m actually not sure how I feel about it just yet. The whole thing was basically one big visual metaphor for Erin’s struggle about what to do with Lilan. Whether she should accept Lilan’s fate and leave her here or resolve to be like her mother and risk it all to save her. Should she stick to her beliefs despite the threat of execution, something that she has seen first hand? Or will she break before her trauma and do nothing? While the answer is obvious, we wouldn’t have a series otherwise, the way Erin communicated it was… effective. Eerie, awkwardly communicated at times, but effective.
The big thing I liked about it was obviously all of the evocative imagery. Erin has this fantastic art style it rarely uses, only ever bringing it out when depicting Beast-Lords and Touda, which this entire episode was basically drawn in. That’s beautiful! But this same art style doesn’t make for particularly… informative scenes either. It often repeated itself, with vague shapes/colors and lots of fog. Sure, that’s a nice eerie atmosphere. But it felt like the episode could have been half as long and still communicated effectively. Similarly, I also enjoyed how Erin used Jone in this episode, and the final reveal of her calling him “Father” instead of just “Oji-san” was nice. I kind of liked it more implied then outright spoken, but it works either way.
Finally we come to episode 28, “Death of Jone”. In case you couldn’t figure it out by the title, Jone dies in this one. And you know what? I absolutely hate that. Not Jone’s death, that was done really well and we will talk about it. No, I hate that the title of the damn episode spoiled the contents that much. It reminds me of the Ashita no Joe episode previews that would often spoil the climax of the next episode. I don’t understand who keeps thinking this is a good idea? Why would you want to spoil the emotional premise of the entire episode at the title, making Esal’s reveal of it to Erin all the weaker. Sure, a lot of it was hinted at in the previous episode with Jone appearing in Erin’s visions of her mother, but that’s just good storytelling/foreshadowing. This is…. This is spoilers.
Getting into the actual content of the episode, that was great. Erin losing another parental figure and having to process/deal with it, only this time doing so in a much more healthy manner. She starts by throwing herself into her work, becoming distant from many of those around her and never properly grieving. Eventually Esal comes in like a loving Aunt, taking her on a small trip down memory lane and opening up about her own grief and relationship with Jone. Bathing together like Erin did with her mother, visiting their old clubhouse, just looking at Jone’s life in its entirety. It was a really somber and effecting episode, with a level of emotional vulnerability I wasn’t expecting from Esal of all people.
Compare this to Erin’s experience getting over her mother, Soyon. That one took years. She not only had to get to know Jone and find a new parental figure, she had to meet and interact with Beast-Lords literally tearing her trauma apart. In fact in a lot of ways she still isn’t over the death of her mother, as it haunts her and her decisions to this day. Jone’s meanwhile is largely resolved in a single episode. It serves to propel her forward, pushing her to improve and stick to her beliefs, rather than hold her back. What I’m trying to say is that despite being spoiled for us with the title, Jone’s death and Erin’s subsequent handling of it was done really well.
So yeah, all in all while this week had some ups and downs, some questionable decisions and a fair amount of wasted time, there was still enough in it for me to call it a success. One of the weaker batches for sure, about half of this weeks episodes were rather dull. Luckily though Erin pulled it back with episode 28 that I would still call the week a success. As for what is to come, my hope is that Jone’s death, as well as her vision of her mother, will spur her to take a more proactive hand in caring for/getting Lilan out of her predicament. Maybe we will get to see her in active conflict with the status quo or something. Whatever happens though, I really just want Erin to start introducing its endgame. To see the light at the end of the tunnel, so to speak.
